Never ending Nakba

As Ilan Pappe has said, most Israeli Jews have no idea of what they did to the Palestinians in 1948. (He also said that those who do know don’t think that what was done was wrong). But that’s only the tip of an iceberg of ignorance.

Because of the mainstream media’s complicity in Zionism’s suppression of the truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, most Americans and Europeans of all faiths and none have no idea of the enormity of Zionism’s crimes.

The Arabic word for what happened in the months before and after Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence on 14 May 1948 is Nakba, meaning catastrophe. That’s a one word description of the fact that upwards of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were dispossessed of their land, their homes and their rights, but complete understanding requires knowledge of something else. Nakba was not simply an event in history. It is a process of ethnic cleansing, a process that has been on-going for 64 years to date and is continuing.

A timely reminder of this fact was contained in an article for the web site This Week in Palestine by Ibrahim Matar, an economist writing from Jerusalem.

He opened his piece by quoting a statement made by Ra’anan Weitz, the director of the Jewish Agency’s Settlement Department in 1948. “I ploughed Palestine into earth by ordering the demolition of 300 abandoned Palestinian villages from the Negev to the Galilee.” (The quotation was from an interview Weitz gave to the Jerusalem Post published on 7 March 1997).

Matar ended his piece with these words of his own:

“The bottom line to the tragedy of the Palestinians is that the Catastrophe of 1948 is still going on, as Jewish colonisation of the West Bank continues to expand. The objectives of the Jews have not changed since the early part of the twentieth century. Their motto continues to be ‘dunum after dunum of land’ for the exclusive use of Jews.

The Jews claim that the Palestinians wish to destroy Israel. The fact is that the Jews have already literally destroyed Palestine, and in front of the watchful eyes of the world community represented by the Quartet, they continue with their policies and practices to complete the liquidation of the Palestinian presence in historical Palestine.”

Question: Is completion of the liquidation of the Palestinian presence in historical Palestine really Zionism’s mission?

I believe the answer is “Yes”, and that unless the major powers led by America summon up the will to call and hold Zionism’s monster child to account for its crimes, there will be a final ethnic cleansing of Palestine at some point in a foreseeable future.

Footnote

I also believe that Matar should be more precise with his language. His use of “the Jews” implies that all Jews everywhere are responsible for Zionism’s crimes. That is not so, but… If the rising global tide of anti-Israelism is not to be transformed into anti-Semitism, making another great turning against Jews everywhere inevitable at some point, the Jews of the world must play their necessary part in containing and confronting Zionism. As I never tire of pointing out, silence is not the way to refute and demolish a charge of complicity in Zionism’s crimes.

22 Responses to Never ending Nakba

How many British people have no idea what they have done to the Germans in the 40’s?
Because of the mainstream media’s complicity in Western suppression of the truth of history. Most Americans and Europeans of all faiths and none have no idea of the enormity of British crimes.
How many British people are aware of the German catastrophe where 12-14 million German were dispossessed of their land, their homes and their rights between 1944-1950 and were ethnic cleansed by orders of Winston Churchill “”Expulsion is the method which, insofar as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble… A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of disentanglement of populations, not even of these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they have ever been before”?
How many British people are aware of the millions of Germans civilians they took part in killing?
When will finally see British people start educating their children apologize and repent for their crimes during WWII which are by any scale far greater than anything which happened 3 years later in Israel.

When will finally see British people start educating their children apologize and repent for their crimes during WWII which are by any scale far greater than anything which happened 3 years later in Israel.

1) Are we supposed to conclude that the Palestinians had behaved like the Germans before the British got involved?

2) It seems you are suggesting that the Brits should just have left Hitler to get on with it…..

Yes the Palestinians did start a war of aggression to annihilate the Jews of Israel as the Arab League Secretary General said about their upcoming war the Arab would start “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”
It is you who are suggesting the Israel should have just let the Arabs go on with it. It is you who are suggesting the Israel should have just let Palestinian towns attack convoys to the besieged Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem cut off from water and food and let them die.

“This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”

You seem to have missed out most of that quotation, why is that?

“Personally I hope the Jews do not force us into this war because it will be a war of elimination and it will be a dangerous massacre which history will record similarly to the Mongol massacre or the wars of the Crusades. I think the number of volunteers from outside Palestine will exceed the Palestinian population.”

Anyway, it leads on to the following questions:
Where are the refugee camps that the displaced Germans are in now, how many Germans are detained without trial, and are they still fighting for their right to return?

Unlike their Arab counterparts the Germans had the decency to absorb their own people. The fact that Palestinians are still being abused and discriminated against by their Arab brothers is those brothers fault. Those Germans moved on and made a life for themselves in Germany just like the Jews removed by Arabs from their homes in Iraq Morocco Hebron Jerusalem and the rest of of the Arab world did in Israel. They didn’t get a “right of return”.

Well if you are not abdi salam from AJ comemnt section that is obviously standard copy and paste hasbara propaganda. As any normal sane unbiased person would evaluate what was the root cause of any conflict we can deduce that the obvious cause of this here conflict was European Zionists intent of taking ancestral Palestine:
‘I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.’ David Ben-Gurion (an eastern European) to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 1938.

The Never ending Nakba is a very fitting headline. We never hear the end of it, yet you will never see your friends in London mention their own crimes a few short years earlier.
It is absurd to hear Alan Hart that the Zionist media and establishment is suppressing the truth about the 1948 war when it is discussed far more than the British crimes of WWII. While being a part of the media how many reports did he make about the millions of Germans forced out of their homes?
Zionist deadly symptoms? I never talked about extermination of Arabs unlike the Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem which conspired with Hitler to bring the final solution to the Jews of Israel.

“When will finally see British people start educating their children apologize and repent for their crimes during WWII which are by any scale far greater than anything which happened 3 years later in Israel.” says Cosmo, pointing to the inconsistency of criticizing Israel for ethnic cleansing, but ignoring the worse crimes committed by the Allied during WWII.

He’s right. A consistent anti-Zionist rejects anti-fascism, the racist idea that German crimes against Jews, Russians and others were worse than Allied ones against Germans. But this leads to the opposite conclusion to the one Cosmo intends. Zionism depends on the Allied narrative, and Cosmo defends it.

Very good article by Alan, but I think that there is a slight terminological problem there which I mentioned before and also discussed a few times with Alan.

As Abraham Burg, Gideon Levy and many other commentators including myself suggest, for the Israeli, Zionism is dead. They are basically driven by Israeli patriotism. They want the Palestinians out of ‘their’ land because this is how they interpret the meaning of living in a ‘Jewish State’. For them, Israel is ‘Jews only State’. Zionism, on the other hand, is largely a Jewish Diaspora discourse..it is there to sketch an imaginary line between the Zionists and the AZZ.

While the Zionist lobby for Israel is the open, the AZZ seek hegemony within the Left.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recently issued its weekly report on Israeli violations in the occupied territory for the period between 9- 15 of May, revealing that Israeli soldiers shot at least 370 Palestinians during the Nakba commemoration, and continued their violations in the West bank and the Gaza Strip.
The report indicated that the number of Palestinians injured by Israeli fire since the beginning of this year arrived to 1339, adding that the ratio of injuries is 69 a week, comparing to 28 a week last year.

Most of the injuries took place when the soldiers attacked Nakba protests on May 15, especially the protests that were held near the Qalandia terminal, north of Jerusalem, and the Ofer prison terminal near Ramallah.

OCHA further stated that Israel demolished seven Palestinian buildings under the claim that they were built without construction permits.

It said that 27 Palestinians were also injured during a weekly protest against Israeli restrictions preventing Palestinian farmers from reaching their lands near the Qadumim settlement, built on lands that belong to residents of Qalqilia, in the northern part of the West Bank.

OCHA also said that Israeli settlers carried out several attacks against the residents and their lands, leading to several injuries while Israeli settlers cut more than 430 trees, including at least 280 olive trees near Nablus, Salfit and Bethlehem.

The Office said that Israeli settlers cut at least 3.070 trees since the beginning of 2012 (most of them are olive trees), and injured 50 residents.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza issued a statement revealed the 404 patients in Gaza, suffering from Kidney failure are facing serious deterioration in their health conditions due to the lack of “Bloodlines” supplies needed for dialysis.
Spokesperson of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, Ashraf Al-Qudra, stated that without the “bloodlines” dozens of dialysis machines will stop, an issue which will pose a direct threat to the lives of the patients who need to undergo dialysis 2 – 3 times a week, the Quds Net News Agency reported.

He said that the bloodline supplies will run out very in the coming few days especially when taking into consideration that dialysis clinics are serving approximately 150 patients each day.

“When they supplies run out, clinics will shut down and dozens of patients will face serious deterioration in their health conditions”, Al-Qudra said, “Their lives will be the tax they pay for this 6-year long Israeli siege imposed on Gaza”.

He voiced an appeal to the International Red Cross, the World Health Organization (WHO) and several local and international legal and humanitarians groups to intervene before a disaster takes place.